The invention described herein arose in the course of, or under, contract No. DE-AC08-88NV10617 between the United States Department of Energy and E.G.&G. Energy Measurements, Inc.
The present invention relates generally to electronic data processing and more particularly to a system for attainment and processing of visual images for the purpose of identifying objects within the image.
It is well known that there has been much progress lately in increasing the ability of computers to rapidly manipulate data. However, all of this computing power is frequently limited by the unavailability of relevant input data. Therefore, one of the major current focuses of computer science is to find ways to use some of the available computing power to aid the data input process. Ideally, a computer could be made to communicate with the outside world in much the same manner as does a human being, such as by touching, seeing, hearing, or reading the relevant data. Not only would this make the human/computer interface easier for humans, the ability of computers to interact directly to "real world" stimuli allows us to take advantage of the inherent advantages of computers--such as their ability to analyze data and respond to it more quickly than can a human--in tasks previously thought inappropriate to be handled by computers.
One type of data input which is being incorporated into computer applications is visual recognition. It is a simple matter to "digitize" the output of a video camera such that the image can be introduced into the computer in binary form, and various systems have been devised for accomplishing this. One scan encoding scheme for digitizing a video image is taught by U.S. Pat. No. 4,107,648 issued to Frank. The Frank scheme is particularly useful for encoding data to be used as a picture, in that it requires far less memory to store the image than would be required if a separate value were to be stored for each pixel location in the picture. However, it should be noted that manipulation and/or analysis of data within the picture might be more difficult than would be the case if the data were encoded in a more straight forward scheme.
A variety of means for analyzing the content of a scanned image have been developed. The most extensively developed aspect of this has been in the field of optical character recognition ("OCR") or document recognition, wherein relatively easily distinguishable features of characters, documents, or the like are compared to a library of reference images. An example of document recognition is found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,208,652 issued to Marshall. Additional means have been developed for analyzing specific aspects of a scanned image. An example of a method for analyzing the texture of a scanned image is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,225 issued to Gouge.
The above references are far from an exhaustive listing of the various ways in which previous inventors have realized distinguishable features or characteristics from a digitized video image. Each of the prior art methods has presented a significant advance in the field and, apparently, each has been found to be useful for its intended purpose. However, the science of computerized image recognition is by no means fully developed. One primary problem for which there has previously been no fully satisfactory solution involves the fact that the "real world" contains a nearly infinite variety of changing lighting conditions, background objects, and other potential variations.
No prior art image recognition means or method, to the inventors' knowledge, has successfully provided an effective way to distinguish objects in a complex real world environment. All prior art methods and/or means have either looked for a specific aspect of a video image and/or have compared relatively easily distinguishable features to a library of images.